Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text for today’s message is found in John chapter 1 verse 18. John 1:18. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. John 1:18. No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten son who is in the bosom of the father. He has declared him. Let us pray. Father, we thank you for your most holy word. We thank you that your spirit has come to put this word upon our hearts and to transform our lives. We thank you for the spirit speaking through your word.

And we pray now that you would illumine this text for understanding that we may more perfectly show forth the divine nature that you have made us partakers of. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated. If you’re visiting with us today, I would encourage you to make out the visitor card that you should have received in the visitors packet and you can leave that in the pew or we can pick it up later.

J.I. Packer wrote the following about the son and the father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child and having God as his father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. Of course, the beauty is that those of us who have been brought by the work of the Holy Spirit into relationship with God the Father know just that.

As we come to worship today, it is with the knowledge that the Father has called us forth to give him glory and honor and to give us gifts of glory, knowledge, and life. The father loves us and he has called us here to minister that love to us by the Holy Spirit speaking to us of Jesus, his beloved son. Unfortunately, of course, this is not the experience of many. In a popular song of this last year or two by a group called Everclear, we have these lyrics.

Father of mine, tell me, where have you been? You know, I just closed my eyes. My whole world disappeared. Father of mine, take me back to the day when I was still your golden boy. Back before you went away. I remember blue skies, walking the block. I loved it when you held me high. I love to hear you talk. You’d take me to the movie. You’d take me to the beach. You take me to a place inside that’s so hard to reach.

Father of mine, tell me where did you go? You had the world inside your hand, but you didn’t seem to know. Father of mine, tell me, “What do you see when you look back at your wasted life and you don’t see me?” I was 10 years old doing all that I could. It wasn’t easy for me to be a scared white boy in a black neighborhood. Sometimes you’d send me a birthday card with a $5 bill. I never understood you then, and I guess I never will.

Daddy gave me a name. My daddy gave me a name. Then he walked away. That’s the continual refrain throughout the song. Father of mine, tell me, how do you sleep? Sleep with the children you abandoned and the wife I saw you beat. I’ll never be safe. I will never be sane. I will always be weird inside. I will always be lame. No, I’m a grown man with a child of my own. And I swear I’m not going to let her know all the pain I have known.

Then he walked away. Daddy gave me a name and then he walked away.

This theme of reconciliation or lack of reconciliation—relationship between father and son—permeates pop culture as well as classical culture. Why? Because this is the state of the human race apart from the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. Alienation between father and son. And this text at the conclusion of John’s prologue, the capstone of it, as it were, tells us that when the Lord Jesus Christ comes to affect salvation, he comes to reveal the father and to bring us into relationship with that father once more.

He comes to heal this broken relationship between father and son, not caused by the father’s abandonment, of course, as the song indicated, but the abandonment of the son who turned his back on the father—Adam in the garden and all men since then.

This truth of the fatherhood of God is central to the Christian faith and I think it’s also central then to Christian action. If the scriptures are about credenda and agenda, the scriptures principally teach what we are to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man. The duty is connected to that revelation of who God is, and the revelation of who God is is that he is our father now and we are his children through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And this means that our mission today is to be better fathers and better children. For you children today, the mission from today’s text—that Jesus comes to reveal the father—is to love our fathers. The mission for children is to love our fathers and to be good children. And the mission for parents is to love our children and to be better parents.

Now, we’ve talked about the background for verse 18. It comes in the context really of the section 14 to 18. And as we saw last week, that section has direct reference back to Exodus 32-34. And we’ll play off of that text as we get into a consideration of what does God do to restore his people? What was our sin in abandoning our relationship with him? What is our recovery as children of God? And what impact does that have on us being fathers and children in the context of family relationships?

We said last week that it’s really very important—before we move on from the text about the comparison between Moses and Jesus—that there is a commonality of subject matter between the Old Testament and New Testament. It’s not as if the law was revealed through Moses but in contradiction to that grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No, we said that what is contrasted in this section of the prologue is not law and grace, but rather the relative displays of God’s love in the law and the even greater display of God’s love in Christ.

The relative display of God’s love through the mediator Moses in the giving of the law and in relationship to his people, and the greater display of love in the finished revelation and mediatorship of the Lord Jesus Christ. Moses was preached grace and truth as God came and exegeted his name to him in Exodus 34. So there’s no contradiction between law and grace, but there is an acceleration of blessing. There’s a commonality of experience.

We’re so used to being taught—at least those of us who were raised in dispensationalist churches—that upon our getting serious about our Christian faith and going to dispensationalist churches, we were so used to thinking of the church in Israel as completely separate entities, and that Israel was marked by failure and disappointment. We’re so used to that. We don’t really think of the great blessings that Israel experienced in the context of the Old Testament. The history of that nation was the history of one magnificent expression of divine grace after another, drawn, as it were, from the deep well of God’s only begotten son, whose fullness no man nor race could ever exhaust.

Israel was not in a position of not having grace and truth preached to it and not having experienced it. That was the message as God came to exegete himself to his people through Moses, and that was their experience in the Old Testament. They did conquer that land. The patriarchs saw the conversion of the world essentially by the end of the book of Genesis. Israel sees the conversion—at least by way of foreshadowing a conversion of the world—in the time of David’s son Solomon, as all the nations stream up to Jerusalem to hear from the wisest man that ever lived this side of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Old Testament is about blessing upon blessing, grace upon grace. And so the point is not to contrast those two. When we do that, we think too little of what the Lord Jesus Christ has accomplished. If we understand that the experience and the message of the Old Testament was grace and truth—it was the love of God illustrated to them, and it was the experience of that love of God and his grace time after time in the lives of the patriarchs and the lives of Israel—if we understand the greatness of the Old Testament, then it is even a greater fact that the Lord Jesus Christ has brought all of that to completion and by way of contrast, now we move on and accelerate the grace and the blessings that flow to us through the coming of the son, the Lord Jesus Christ.

We even saw that the narrative structures of these two passages in Exodus 32-34 are similar to John 1 in the prologue. Let me give you one more point I didn’t mention last week. In John 17:26, Jesus says—this is the high priestly prayer of our savior—”I have declared to them your name and will declare it, that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.” Jesus says that he had declared to them the father’s name, and this is precisely what God did in Exodus 34:6. The Lord passes before Moses and proclaims, “The Lord, the Lord God, Yahweh, Yahweh, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abounding in goodness and truth.”

Definite correlations to the work of our savior recorded in the Gospel of John. But of course, all of that Old Testament blessings, as great as they were, were a pale foreshadowing of what would happen when the son came to reveal God—when the son came to reveal the father that he was in intimate relationship with.

The fatherhood of God is a dominant theme in the gospel of John. I got a new book a couple of days ago on the fatherhood of God developed from the early church period, from Origen to Athanasius. And Athanasius, in his development of the fatherhood of God, drew heavily upon the Johannine writings of John—his gospel and his letters. The theme of the fatherhood of God predominates in the gospel and his epistles, and also upon Paul’s doctrine of adoption.

These are the two great pivot points of the early church’s understanding of the fatherhood of God. God is our father by adoption, not by natural generation. We are those who have been born again through the sovereign election of God and brought into faith and relationship to him as our father through adoption. So Paul talks about that. So this prologue sets us up for this very important theme: that it is the son alone who reveals God.

And this passage in verse 18 is emphatic about this. We read in the King James version, “No one has seen God at any time.” The Greek order of the phrase, a literal translation would be, “God no one has seen ever.” And so it is the son and the son alone who reveals the father. Jesus says the same thing—that the father has not been seen—in John 6:46. “Not that anyone has seen the father.”

So we do not see the father. The father is unseeable by man. But the Lord Jesus Christ is the revelation of that father. If you want to see what God is, or who God is, then you must look at the Lord Jesus Christ and his revelation of him. Jesus is the unique son of God. Again, as with the earlier reference to “only begotten son,” the emphasis here is not on the eternal begottenness of the son—we’ve talked about that before—but that really is not the emphasis.

The emphasis is the uniqueness. This is the only son of the father, the only begotten son. The uniqueness of the Lord Jesus Christ and his revelation of the father is pictured for us in verse 18. There’s a strong focus on the uniquely begotten of God. The son is the one who reveals the father. And this is the point: What does the son show us?

Well, the son doesn’t show us an abstract god outside of covenantal relationship. The son—the prologue comes to its great Christian crescendo, its great chorus at the end of it—it says that he who is in the bosom of the father, he has declared him. So the son declares the father. Who does the Lord Jesus Christ show us? God, certainly. But specifically John wants us to understand, as we read this gospel, that the son comes to reveal the father. It is a covenantal revelation of the father.

So who does the son show us when we look at the son in the gospels? We see God the father. The son reveals the father. Now he reveals this father. You know, again, to make sure we’re not mistaking this, he reveals him as both merciful and wrathful. And if this text tells us a truth—that doesn’t just come into being in AD 68 or whenever this gospel was written—if it tells us a truth that is a truth for all eternity, then it says that the son is always the revelation of the father.

And I think that, as well as reading that into the Gospel of John that it wants us to do, remembering all these references to Exodus 32-34 in this prologue, I think it’s also pointing us back that whatever was revealed about the father in the Old Testament has been revealed by the son. So it is that son who, in a prefiguration of the incarnation and his descent into human flesh, descends and becomes the pillar of cloud and meets with Moses and speaks to him.

The son is the one who reveals the father in the Old Testament—a very important truth for making sure we do not fall into the common heresy of our day: that somehow the Old Testament is about the law and the father and his wrath, and the New Testament is about the son and grace. That is not the point, as we’ve seen from a careful look at Exodus 32-34 in the specifics. And here we’re told in the general sense now that whatever has been revealed about God has been revealed by the son, and the son has made known the father.

So the Old Testament is a chronicling of the father through the revelation of the son. Now there’s a fullness to that revelation that comes with the incarnation that we must not lose track of. But we must also not lose track of the fact that the son reveals the father. So if we see a wrathful father, it’s because the son is revealing him as such. The son is wrathful. The lamb is wrathful in those elements of the Old Testament.

And he’ll be wrathful again as he moves in chapter 2 to cleanse the temple. So the son is gracious, but the son is also wrathful because he is revealing the father. Now I would say there that, of course, we want to keep in mind that this is—I don’t mean to imply by the outline that somehow God is bipolar or something. God’s wrath serves to function to demonstrate his mercy. And I think this is a tremendous argument for our Wednesday night discussion groups in terms of eschatology.

God’s essential character is God is love. And while we can say that God is hate, he is never declared that way in the scriptures for a particular reason. You know, he visits the iniquity unto the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate him. But he visits his mercy unto thousands of generations of them that love him. The overarching theme of his history is not an equality of wrath and love and mercy.

It is wrath to demonstrate love and mercy. And so his essential character is love, and so the son comes to reveal the father, and he reveals the father in a covenantal relationship. You know, again, this will help us snap out of our Greek mindset that likes to think of God as an abstraction somehow. And we use the term “God”—it’s a good thing in our prayers to refer to the father. It’s a good thing in our conversations one to the other to speak of the father blessing us.

It’s a good thing to put some words around the word “God” that we use so often, because “God” can become this abstract Greek concept. Jesus reveals these abstract qualities of this abstract God. But I think it is exceedingly significant that when we read about this revelation of God, remember in verse one, “The Word was with God, the Word was God. God.” Well, what does all that mean? We find the revelation of that is in terms of relationship between a father and a son.

Now, that means that our Christianity is never in isolation one from the other. I think that’s a necessary corollary of this. God brings us into relationship in the triune fellowship of the Holy Spirit, son, and father. And that’s his revelation to us. And he tells us then that our Christianity must be worked out in connection with the relationships that we have in the context of our lives.

So it’s a great truth that we’re brought into this relationship as his children, but also that we live out that covenantal revelation that the Lord Jesus Christ brings to us by revealing to us the father. Matthew 11:27 and following: Jesus says, “All things have been delivered to me by my father. No one knows the son except the father, nor does anyone know the father except the son and the one to whom the son wills to reveal him.”

The Lord Jesus Christ has come to reveal to us the nature of the father, and in doing that he reveals to us the relationship of father, son, and Holy Spirit. This is why in our catechism questions it is good to ask, “What is God?” You know, God is a spirit—he is a spirit infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. But we immediately follow that in our lessons for the next quarter of our church with an auxiliary question: “Who is God?”

Because God reveals himself in terms of his person and relationship of the father to the son. What we have in the Lord Jesus Christ is the exegesis of a lifegiving father. The exegesis, the declaration in verse 18 of this father, is that the father is a giver of life, and the Lord Jesus Christ is a lifegiving spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the Lord and giver of life.

The proclamation by our savior—the exegesis of the name—is of the father as a lifegiving God, and that proclamation, the prologue tells us, has given life to those who have been called by the father to reveal himself to. The proclamation of the lifegiving God gives life. It recreates the world. That’s what the message of this whole relationship to creation is. It ushers in this proclamation that now comes in the Lord Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John.

This proclamation of this lifegiving father ushers in a new humanity and utterly condemns the old humanity. All things are being shaken. Now, Hebrews 12 tells us we had an earthquake, and many experienced it a couple of weeks ago. Well, whenever we have an earthquake, we should think of Hebrews 12:25-29.

“See that you don’t refuse him who speaks. He speaks this life-giving word. If they did not escape who refused him who spoke on earth, much more shall not we escape if we turn away from him who speaks from heaven? Whose voice then shook the earth? But now he has promised saying, ‘Yet once more I shake not only the earth, but also heaven.’ Now this ‘yet once more’ indicates the removal of those things that are being shaken as of things that are made, that the things which cannot be shaken may remain.

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and a godly fear. Our God is a consuming fire.”

The revelation by the son of the father, the exegesis of the father, brings life to the new humanity. And at the same time, that proclamation of the voice of God shakes the old humanity. And the end of history will be the removal of all things that can be shaken until the kingdom of Christ—established at his coming, in his incarnation in a definitive way—establishes itself as all things, in all the world.

The revelation of this lifegiving father is what has come to our world, and the world will never be the same. The world will manifest increasingly the relationship of father and son. The son and spirit are revealed in this revelation of the father.

And third: restored fathers and sons are children of God and image their heavenly father. So in terms of this revelation, Jesus says something very significant in John chapter 20 verse 17.

Jesus says to her in his resurrection, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to my father. But go to my brethren and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my father and your father and to my God and your God.’”

This lifegiving work of the Lord Jesus Christ comes that we might now have relationship again, restored through the son to the father, so that he is now declared by Jesus to be our father. Jesus’s work has been completed for his people, and he goes to his father who is also our father.

So as we think of the implications of this: The first implication is that we are restored as true children of God. Well, what does it mean? What is the sin that is referred back to in Exodus 32-34?

I should just mention there that the relationship between Exodus 32-34 and what we’re saying today is this: Moses was a wonderful mediator with a wonderful message, and the Lord Jesus exegeted the name of the father. But now the Lord Jesus comes as the mediator, and he is the son. His intimacy and his uniqueness cannot be shared by Moses, and that’s why we move ahead in the context of blessing. The son now has come to reveal the father, not the servant anymore. His essential nature now is as the son in this revelation. Then we now are being restored as true children of his.

What did those children of God do wrong back in Exodus 32? We talked about this last week. They didn’t wait. Moses was taking a long time to come back. The father was delaying, and they didn’t want to wait for him. This is the common theme of the Old Testament.

Well, first king replaced by second king. Saul, the first king—what does he fail to do? He doesn’t wait for Samuel to come to offer the sacrifices. He decides to do it himself. What does David do? He waits and he waits and he waits. He’s anointed king, but he waits. He waits and he waits and he will not take the robe of Saul before it’s time for him to be king. He will not grasp at the robe of the Lord’s anointed.

I don’t know about all the sin of Ham in reference to Noah, but there’s a robe involved and there’s nakedness that I don’t think is necessarily sexual going on there. I think it’s an attempt by the sons to seize the power and authority of the father, at least by way of imagery. Achan takes the consecrated things from Jericho. And what things does he take? He takes false glory—many shekels of silver and a wedge of gold. And he takes false power. He takes a big, heavy, Babylonish robe of authority. He seeks to clothe himself with authority, not waiting for God to give him authority.

The robe always represents in the Old Testament robing and authority and empowerment for function. Adam and Eve are forgiven of their sins, and then they’re given the priestly robe, the heavy robe of empowerment. People don’t want to wait around for that. Adam didn’t want to wait to receive that fruit that was kept from him for a period of time. The essence of our restoration as children of God is that we are going to be waiters. We are going to be patient.

What’s the first thing the church is told to do in Acts chapter 1? What’s its first job? Is its first job to proclaim the gospel? It is not. Its first job is to wait. In Acts 1:4, we read that they are being assembled together with him. He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the spirit.

The restoration of the children of God restores us to be those who are not like the children in Exodus 32 who don’t wait, not to be like Saul who wouldn’t wait for the priest, not to be like Adam who wouldn’t wait for the right time to be given the fruit that God said eventually would be his, not to be like Achan to seize after authority and power, but to wait and to wait and to wait some more.

The scripture says this is the essence of being the children of God. Acts 1:4, as I said, the first thing the church is told to do is to wait. God says that we’re to remember who we are. I talked about this last week. James 1:24, you’re supposed to look in that mirror, but you walk away, and the foolish man forgets who he is. Well, the mirror of God here tells us very clearly that as restored children of God, we are to be waiters, those who wait.

What did God’s children sin? How did they sin in Exodus 32? The sin of impatience. Young children, impatience. They are not patient. They had the sin of impatience in Exodus 32. The first job of the church in the book of Acts is to wait, to have patience, to wait, to learn to wait.

Now, we can say by way of implication here that’s a job for the father. The father is to train his children in waiting. And in Exodus 32, God was training his children and testing them to show them their impatience. So it’s perfectly proper, young children, for your parents to make you wait for certain things. It’s part of what biblical child rearing is all about. If that’s the most important thing—if the number one problem we have is the sin of Adam—and it’s supposed to be the first task of the church, it seems like it should be very high on our list of priorities in terms of what we teach our children.

And the Lord Jesus, the same way, in fathering his children, his offspring as it were, in Acts, made them wait for the promise of the Holy Spirit.

Secondly, children of God do not seek self glory. In Exodus 32 again, part of the problem was that they had put on ornamentation, and we don’t know what that means, but it does mean they were seeking their own glory.

In Exodus 33, when God tells them—in verse 3—”I will not go up in the midst of the people, I’ll read that again, unto a land flowing with milk and honey, but I will not go up in the midst of you, for you are a stiff-necked people, lest I consume you in the way.” And when the people heard these evil tidings, they mourned, and no man did put on his ornaments. Because God told them, “Take off your ornaments.”

See, again, the impatience is usually an impatience for ornamentation, for glory. We want people to consider us important. We wear beautiful things so that people will look at us and say, “Isn’t he a good-looking guy, or isn’t she a good-looking woman?” You know, we put on ornamentation.

Now, it’s not wrong to want people to give you glory and weight. It’s of the essence of being created in the image of God, I believe. Jesus says that we’re going to receive glory from the father. It’s one of the things he prays for in John 17—is that we might be glorified. But we must always seek glory through the person and work of the savior and from the father, not our own self glory.

John 5: Jesus heals on the Sabbath, and they want to kill him as a result. And he brings a charge against them. And this is the charge in verse 44: “How can you believe when you receive honor from one another and do not seek the honor that comes from the only God?” You see, they want honor from one another instead of seeking honor that comes from God. That’s the essence of their sin. It’s not wrong to want honor, but we’re to seek honor first and foremost from God. We’re not to seek it first and foremost from one another.

The Old Testament again is filled with people who seek honor from other people. And as a result of that, you know, they want other people’s honor. Joseph’s brothers removed the coat from him. They didn’t like the honor he had. They didn’t want to wait till they matured in terms of their abilities. Rather, they wanted to destroy the one who had honor. They wanted to remove honor from him.

And as I said, Achan at Jericho didn’t just take the robe. He took gold and silver—false glory. Some of our young men the other day who was trying to dye his hair white, and I said, “Oh, that’s that leprous hair.” Look, huh? What am I talking about? Well, why is white hair good in the scriptures? White hair is a sign of age and maturity. But to want to show people that you’re wise and mature before you’ve been given the white hair is wrong. It’s to seek false glory.

Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong to dye your hair white, but it’s an illustration of what we want. We want to appear to people in a particular way. And so we’re all focused on how we are to one another, as opposed to waiting for the glory of God.

Jesus says in John 8:50, “I do not seek my own glory.” See, if we’re children of God, related to the father through the son, we’re going to be like him. “I do not seek my own glory. There is one who seeks and judges.”

And then again in chapter 12:26: “If anyone serves me, let him follow me. And where I am, there my servant will be also. If anyone serves me, him my father will honor.”

Is it wrong to want honor? It is not. It is wrong to want honor from others. We should seek honor from God, our savior tells us.

So children of God wait patiently, and they don’t seek their own honor. They seek honor from God.

Third, they seek the presence of God above all else. Again, here, what was the sin of the children of God in Exodus 32? They didn’t wait for God. They weren’t anxious for his presence. They didn’t say, “Well, he’s delaying. Let’s find out what’s going on, or let’s wait.” No, they moved ahead without him. They moved ahead without the presence of God. And so God’s just judgment on them is an “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” kind of judgment.

When we want to move ahead without God, he says, “Well, go ahead and move ahead, and I’m not going to be there.” It’s what he says in Exodus 33. The restored children of God want more than anything else—more than anything else—they want the presence of God with them.

Hebrews 11:27: “By faith Moses forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king. For he endured as seeing him who is invisible. He saw him who was invisible by faith. And seeing him, he turns his back on all the glory and benefit of Egypt and his princely calling in Egypt.”

The world today seeks satisfaction through other things. We come to the table of the Lord where God gives us life. And that’s what we seek—the presence of Christ. What do you seek? That’s a question that Jesus will ask his disciples in the text from the next couple of weeks, and we have to ask ourselves: what do we seek?

Do we seek the blessings that come forth from God, or do we seek the God behind the blessings? Rock songs again predominate with this theme—constant craving. A woman who denies her proper, human, God-given sexuality. Well, of course she has a constant craving. Romans 1 says that’s what God turns men and women over to if they don’t seek him first and foremost. He turns them over to constant craving that can never be fulfilled, and increasing spirals of sexual sin result from that, or decreasing, downward integration into the void, as Van Til said, because they reject the person of God and seek satisfaction ultimately and primarily in each other.

The Rolling Stones could get no satisfaction. Even U2 singing “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” Well, the scriptures say that what we’re looking for has to be the person and work of the father, through the son, in the power of the spirit. And when we do that, we do have a sense of satisfaction and peace—not total, of course, until this side of the consummation—but still, we seek above all else the presence of God.

What does Moses seek for the people of God, as a good father acting as a father? Moses seeks the presence of God with them. He gets down on his knees and prays to God that he would be present with his people.

So as renewed children of God through this relationship with son and father, we are patient. We do not seek our own glory, and we do seek the presence of God. And finally, the promise of this is that if we’re patient—and really, all of these things can kind of be summed up in patience, can’t they? You know, if we’re patient, it’s because we’re not seeking our own glory first, but glory from God. And it’s because we’ve acknowledged him at the center of our lives.

The mark of the true child of God is to have the patience and the character of the father. And if we do that, then he says we get all of the world. We get to inherit the whole world. Remember we said that at the middle of the prologue, it says that to those that do receive him, to them he gave the power to make manifest that they are children of God. He made us powerful children of God. He has given all things to us. We have the power of inheritance of everything through the son. We have the power of rule.

In Psalm 2, it’s Jesus wielding the iron rod. But in Revelation 2 and 3, it’s the people of God who are given exercise and dominion, the rule of authority over the nations. The children of God who have learned patience are given rule. They are given robes. They are given the next fruit to rule things in the context of God’s supervision and rule in the world. We become dominion people.

And so God dwells in the midst of his people once more, and they conquer the promised land. And so patient children of God are given power over the nations—power to serve and obey, and as a result, power to inherit all things through the work of the savior.

All right. Okay. How does this work in terms of us being children? We’re related back to the father through the work of the son revealing the father to us. But it also has an impact on our own horizontal relationships as well.

Vertically, the essence of the Christian faith is to know God as father, and knowing him as father, to be patient, seeking his glory, his presence, in the right timing, to do what he’s called us to do. But in terms of our relationships one to the other, restored fathers and sons are all children of God. But these restored fathers and sons properly image the father and the son.

If Jesus has come to reveal God in terms of this relationship—proper relationship of father and son—we can at least make some good and necessary inferences or deductions in terms of what children and fathers should look like now that they’re restored in their proper roles to one another. And we’re going to talk about that then.

The father, first of all—and I mentioned this last week—the father is first and foremost a revealer to his children. God comes to reveal himself. In Exodus 32 to 34, he wills to make known his name Yahweh through the mediator of Moses. And here the son comes to reveal the father because the father’s will is to send the son to reveal the father.

In John 5:20, we read: “The father loves the son and showeth him all things that he himself does, and he will show him greater things than this.”

In John 8:28, Jesus says unto them, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you shall know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself. But as my father hath taught me, I speak these things.”

So in the Gospel of John, the father reveals himself to be someone who shows his son all things and who teaches his son things. Jesus says, “The Father has shown me things, so I reveal them. The Father has taught me things, and these are the things that I do. I do them to you.” And the implication is that the father, as a model for all fathers, is anxious, willing, and able. He wants to reveal himself to his children. Without God willing to reveal himself, God is unknowable.

This concept in verse 18 is just anathema to the Greek mindset. The Greek mindset says that God is basically unknowable—certainly unknowable as father. Xenophanes says that guesswork is overall. We cannot know anything because God does not choose to reveal himself. Plato said that never can man and God meet. Man really can know virtually nothing of God. Celsus laughed at the way that the Christians called God “father” because he said God is always beyond everything.

Well, this is not the God of the scriptures. This is not the God who is willing to reveal himself through the son as our father, who shows us who he is, who teaches us things in the revelation given to us by the son.

Well, what of the fathers in this church? Do we self-consciously desire to reveal ourselves—to teach and show what we know to the next generation? Or are we like this Greek conception of a father, removed and abstract, with no relationship to son, that is revealing, teaching, instructing, and being intimate in the context of spending time with? Which are you? Are you a Greek father, removed and abstract from your children, simply an authority figure? Or are you a father who desires to reveal himself?

You know, I said earlier that we inherit the world—I put on the outline, we inherit the world of the fathers. Because the only world that we have given to us, in terms of the culture that’s been created, has been given to us by fathers. There is this progression in human knowledge that’s passed on father to son, father to son. And we as Christians, building the greater kingdom that cannot be shaken, well, it seems like the right way to do that is to pass on the knowledge of God one generation to the next, and the application of that knowledge of God to culture, to vocation, to recreation.

Fathers in our church should will to be Christian fathers, not Greek ones—desirous of showing and revealing themselves to their children.

Secondly, the father is an intercessor for his children. Here we have Moses acting in this role. The children of God, you know, have a mediator who acts sort of as a father for them. And when God says he’s going to remove his presence, Moses intercedes for them. You see, this is going on over and over in the context of Moses mediating the father’s love to his children. He intercedes for them.

Jesus always lives to make intercession for us, his offspring, as it were. In John chapter 4, we’ll see a healing of a nobleman’s son. And there are several incidents like this throughout the gospels where the father speaks on behalf of a sick son. The father’s at Cana. His son’s back in Capernaum, and he goes to Jesus and he said, “My son is near death. Will you heal him?” A picture of the father interceding for the son.

In Job, in Job 1, we read—verses 4 and following—that Job’s sons would go and feast in their houses, each at his appointed day, and would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. So it was, in the days of feasting and fun—or feasting rather—had run their course, that Job would send and sanctify them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offerings according to the number of them all. For Job said, “It may be that my sons have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.” This Job did regularly.

The text tells us the proper father intercedes for his children. We should pray for our children at regular intervals. Regularly, Job would pray for his sons. He would ask grace upon grace—not just for himself. And when Moses asked for more grace to be shown to the recipients of God’s grace, he was interceding on behalf of the children of God and his children, as it were, in the wilderness. “You’ve shown them grace. Show them more grace, Lord God. Do not treat my children according to their works, but treat my children according to your grace. Bring them to repentance of their sins if they’ve sinned, and give them blessings.”

A father reveals himself to his children. And on behalf of his children, he intercedes for them. What about you? How often do you pray for your children, mothers and fathers? Do you intercede for them regularly? Is Job an example to you? It is to me. May God grant us the grace that we might intercede on a more consistent and faithful basis for our children.

Third, the father is a sacrificer for his children. John 3:16 says, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.” We think of the sacrifice of the son. But we have given to us, of course, a picture of the son’s—the father’s rather—sacrifice by provision of the son in Abraham.

Abraham has the son that he loves, the son of the promise to him, Isaac, and he’s willing to offer the son on the mount if that’s what God requires. Why does God have that incident happen? For many reasons—God is complex—but surely one is to show us, again, Jesus as he brings that revelation to bear, reveals the father to us, does he not? He reveals a father who will, with a much greater love for his son than we have for ours—there is no doubt about that, much greater love and relationship between the father and son—yet sends that son forth to die on the cross and suffer separation from the father for the sake of us.

The father sacrifices for his children. And God the father does that for us. In John 10:15, Jesus says, “As the father knows me, even so know I the father, and I lay down my life for the sheep.” He lays down his life because of the father’s love for him. So it shows us that love moves itself to sacrifice the object of his great love through the death on the cross for our purposes.

The father sacrifices for his children.

Fathers, what do you do to sacrifice for your children? Don’t tell me you go to work. That’s your vocational calling—you enjoy doing it usually. You’ll have to do it anyway, even if it’s just you. And we’ve, often, a few of us have talked in the last 6 months or a year: how do we sacrifice for our wives? We’re supposed to. Ephesians tells us what are the practical ways in which we sacrifice for our wives. And today, what is the way we have—either properly or improperly—imaged the fatherhood of God in our homes in terms of sacrifice for our children?

Have we given of our time to our children? Have we given of our energy and attention to our children? And have we done it the way that the heavenly father does—not grudgingly, not complainingly, not, you know, kind of resenting it and trying to get it over with quick?

God sacrifices for the sake of his children. The father does. Moses prayed for the children of God in the wilderness. He taught them about God. He revealed the father to them, and he worked hard for them. He sacrificed for them. He sacrificed for the people of God. And so fathers in homes at Reformation Covenant Church should also do these same things.

And then God is also a giver to his children. God gives to his children. And obviously in Exodus 32-34, God is perpetually giving of himself to his children, and then he gives them the promised land. In John 6:32…